The present invention relates to a system and method for selective recording of various types of information.
The explosion of information now available relating to a wide variety of topics ranging from business to entertainment has driven the development of technology capable of providing this information to various selected groups and individuals. Once the information is conveyed from a source to a destination, the information is often categorized and stored either by individuals or by service organizations for subsequent retrieval of selected information.
Regardless of the particular form of received information, or the character of the storage media, it is often desirable to identify information of interest and extract that information from the incoming data stream for subsequent storage. This procedure optimizes the use of the storage media while also increasing the efficiency of the user in assimilating the information. Thus, the user interested in ascertaining knowledge relative to a particular area is exposed to the most relevant information from a wide variety of sources without being inundated with extraneous facts, figures, and advertisements. Similarly, a user may select a particular audio or video program for recording from continuously broadcast information so that valuable time is not wasted viewing or listening to unwanted information.
Many people no longer xe2x80x9ctune-inxe2x80x9d to a single broadcast from beginning to end. Instead, people often interleave their viewing or listening with xe2x80x9cchannel surfingxe2x80x9d and xe2x80x9cad zappingxe2x80x9d or xe2x80x9cfilteringxe2x80x9d of information. Filtering is commonly called xe2x80x9cad zappingxe2x80x9d but is used herein to refer to elimination or avoidance of advertisements or other repetitive information, such as repeated news footage or the like. Surfing, as used herein, refers to searching over time and/or available information channels for xe2x80x9cinterestingxe2x80x9d information.
A number of prior art systems have recognized the problem of eliminating extraneous information prior to recording for subsequent retrieval and review. Many of these systems are limited to use with video information (often in combination with audio information), such as a television broadcast, and are not easily adaptable to other forms of information.
Many of the systems designed for use with audio/video (AV) information rely on prior marking or coding of the information for subsequent identification by a recording device. For example, a television broadcast may contain information relative to the program characteristics and content such as the starting and ending times, the type or content of the program, a program guide summary, a classification, a rating, or the like. This additional information may be included when the signal is originally broadcast, but is typically added by an annotation service. The signal is received and decoded and may be used to control any of a number of devices. For example, closed captioning information may be decoded to provide a textual transcript of the audio information, or the decoding receiver may limit what type of programs are viewed. The signal may also be utilized to automatically record particular programs on preselected channels via control of a video cassette recorder (VCR) and VCR recording tape cassette. Annotation services have been relied upon to facilitate prior art systems which provide surfing functions.
Reliance upon an annotation service requires the viewer to subscribe to the service and forces the viewer to explicitly select a menu item which ultimately corresponds to an approximate time/channel slot. This is a continuing expense for the viewer and may not support all of the channels which the viewer receives. In addition, the interesting material, such as a sports broadcast during the nightly news, may not be considered a xe2x80x9cprogramming unitxe2x80x9d by the annotation service so it would not be given an identifier which could be used by such systems. Furthermore, the interesting information may be broadcast on other channels or time slots and would not be identified.
Other prior art systems and methods which are designed primarily to eliminate recording of commercials (zapping) during a program broadcast rely on a change in amplitude of the video and/or audio signal components to control the recording of the information. The recording device monitors the incoming signal while recording and detects commercials by the characteristic video fade and/or audio fade between a program segment and a commercial. When a commercial is detected, the recording is paused so that the unwanted information is not recorded. Some prior art systems pause for a predetermined period of time (i.e. 15 or 30 seconds) after detecting a fade (or eliminate material between two fades separated by a standard advertisement interval) to avoid recording the advertisement. These systems rely on non-intrinsic characteristics of the broadcast signal which may lead to incorrect blanks in the recording of the desired program material. For example, an artistic fade in the middle of a program broadcast may be mistaken for a fade prior to an advertisement resulting in an undesirable 30 second blank in the recorded material. In addition, these approaches are limited to the elimination of advertisements and would be difficult to adapt to elimination of other xe2x80x9cuninterestingxe2x80x9d information from the incoming information stream, such as repetitive news footage. Furthermore, as such systems become more prevalent, broadcasters may reduce or eliminate the fades altogether to defeat operation of these systems so that advertisements reach their intended audience.
Another approach found in prior art systems designed to provide automatic recording of a particular television program of interest, requires the user to enter an index code into a VCR which is decoded to determine the broadcast channel, program starting time, and program duration. Since these systems do not monitor the actual broadcast signal being received, once recording begins, it continues for the duration specified regardless of the particular content of the signal. These systems are subject to recording errors resulting from minor modifications to the programming schedule of the television stations. Such minor schedule changes often occur to accommodate important news broadcasts or the like.
One alternative approach used to eliminate advertisements includes adding control information to the recording so that the advertisements are skipped when the recording is replayed. This avoids lost information due to an erroneous indication of an advertisement but requires the user to wait while the recording is fast-forwarded through the advertisement. Since this approach also relies on audio/video fades, it could easily be defeated by broadcasters when the economic incentive becomes great enough. Another approach offered by at least one television manufacturer provides a xe2x80x9creal-timexe2x80x9d zapping function which allows the viewer to scan other channels for 30 seconds before automatically returning to the original channel, so as to avoid a standard length advertisement.
Prior art AV editing systems have utilized the highly constrained structure of various news programs to segment a broadcast based on recognizing predetermined logos and faces of newscasters which are broadcast repeatedly. After receiving and recording a newscast or other structured program, these systems attempt to identify the various segments by separating the individual frames into regions and searching for the previously identified logos or faces. The segments are then classified and archived for use in future programs.
It is thus an object of the present invention to provide a system and method for selectively recording information based on intrinsic characteristics of the received information signal.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a system and method which avoids recording information which a user has previously identified as being uninteresting.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a system and method for automatically locating and recording information of interest broadcast on any one of a number of available broadcast channels.
Yet another object of the present invention is to provide a system and method which automatically avoids recording repetitive information.
Still another object of the present invention is to provide a system and method which utilize sequential pattern matching to identify previously marked information and to control a recording device based on the outcome of the pattern matching.
A still further object of the present invention is to provide a data structure particularly suited for use in a system and method for selective recording of information which facilitates efficient, unique, and reliable pattern matching of information.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a system and method for selective recording of information which utilizes sequential pattern matching of information based on a summary statistical characterization of the information.
In carrying out the above objects and other objects and features of the present invention a system is provided which includes a persistent memory for memorized information segments (marked by user or by repetition) and control logic for computing and matching statistical vectors based on the received information. The control logic implements sequential pattern matching using the statistical vectors to identify memorized information within the incoming information stream. The control logic is linked to a recording device to selectively record information based on the result of the pattern matching.
A data structure is also provided for use with the present invention and with other similar systems designed to uniquely and reliably identify information of interest (or of no interest) for recording (or omission from a recording) using sequential pattern matching. The data structure is organized around statistical vectors, each characterizing an information xe2x80x9cframe.xe2x80x9d An information frame is a short cohesive amount of data. For example, for video, this could be a single image field. The data structure includes an indexable table for each element of the statistical vector. Each table provides a list of the information frame xe2x80x9cidentifiersxe2x80x9d associated with a given value or range of values of that element of the statistical vector. Each information frame identifier includes a statistical vector representing an information frame, a pointer to the previously stored frame, and a pointer to the subsequently stored frame. The sequence of information frames which are joined by previous/subsequent frame pointers will be referred to as an information segment. Depending on the mode of operation, the data structure may also include the time length to record following the memorized information segment or the last date/occurrence count of the memorized information segment.
A method is also provided for use with the system disclosed and other similar systems. The method includes controlling a recording device based on sequential pattern matching of information. The method includes marking information of interest, computing a sequence of statistical vectors representing the marked information, and storing the statistical vectors and sequence information to allow future pattern matching. The method also includes identifying memorized information segments within an incoming information stream utilizing sequential pattern matching against the memorized sequence of statistical vectors, and controlling a recording device based on the result of this pattern matching.
There are a number of advantages accruing to the present invention. For example, the system and method of the present invention use summary statistics, which capture intrinsic signal information, to detect repetitive material or information of interest, rather than using unintentional signal content, such as audio and/or video fades or annotations. As a result, the present invention does not require an annotation service to provide broadly distributed annotations of the broadcast information. Nor does it rely on unintentional, and avoidable, artifacts of composited media.
Another advantage of the present invention over those systems and methods found in the prior art is that the statistical characterization of the information utilized by the present invention will reduce or eliminate the possibility of false detections resulting in incorrect blanking in the recording of desired information. Since the present invention does not rely on amplitude changes of the received information, its function will not be impaired by incorrect blanking caused by unanticipated changes in the received signal during the course of a program broadcast.
Also unlike prior art systems and methods, the present invention is capable of recording information of interest from any of a large number of received channels without knowing a priori on which channel or at what time the information of interest will be broadcast. Many prior art systems require the user to enter the broadcast time and channel, or a code representing that information, which is translated by the recording device. In contrast, the present invention does not require the user to locate such broadcast information, but only to provide a representative sample of the stable (repeated from installment to installment) introductory information and the length of time to record once the introductory information is located.
Another advantage of the present invention is its applicability to a variety of media sources. The present invention is not limited to audio and/or video information, or broadcast information in general, but may be utilized for sequential pattern matching of virtually any time-based information signal. For example, the present invention may be used in sequential pattern matching of seismographic information, pressure information, or object profile information (such as used in radar and the like) to name a few.
The above objects and advantages in addition to other unenumerated objects, features, and advantages of the present invention will be readily appreciated by one of ordinary skill in the art from the following detailed description of the best mode for carrying out the invention when taken in connection with the accompanying drawings.